It seems that new articles and announcements about MOOCs, or “massive open online courses,” are popping up almost daily. We’ve compiled a digest of the coverage we’ve found to be the most interesting and relevant. Please let us know if you’ve come across something useful that we missed.

In a recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, ﻿Charlie Wesley describes the value of annotating texts and explains that many of his students don’t seem comfortable with the practice. Our MyDante Project allows students not only to annotate Dante’s text digitally, but also to read — and respond to — annotations made by their peers.

This summer, Yong Lee and I began working with Parina Patel (School of Foreign Service) to develop online materials for her undergraduate and graduate statistics courses using Carnegie Mellon University’s Open Learning Initiative (OLI) platform.

Deciding to incorporate blogs or Twitter into your course raises a number of questions that may seem daunting. How will you structure the assignment? How will you connect student work on Twitter or blogs to in-class discussions? As the professor, to what extent will you contribute to the blog or Twitter stream? How will you evaluate student work in these spaces – or will you grade it at all?

Congratulations to the students in Diane Apostolos-Cappadona’s Art and Ethics course! They are currently #1 on the Wikipedia Project leaderboard, which tracks contributions that students in participating courses have made to Wikipedia.

The question of whether to allow students to use laptops in the classroom can be controversial. In a post on the Chronicle’s ProfHacker blog, Mark Sample (professor at George Mason University and occasional CNDLS collaborator) shares some thoughts on this issue.

In a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Derek Bruff, acting director of the Center for Teaching at Vanderbilt University, discusses social pedagogies. He draws on work by Randy Bass and Heidi Elmendorf, as well as citing an example from GU professor Sarah Stiles (Sociology).

Astrid Weigert (German) and her students don’t just think about witches on Halloween — they spend a semester examining the portrayal of witches in literature and film as well as the history of witches. As a Doyle Faculty Fellow, Astrid has redesigned the humanities and writing course to incorporate issues of inclusion and difference.